Greased by lobbying and campaign cash, tax breaks for retirement savings are one thing Congress agrees on. But they also blow out the deficit and add to income inequality.
Five months before Congress faced a near-catastrophic standoff over the debt ceiling, with Republicans demanding restrictions to food and Medicaid programs to rein in spending, a bill that raised the cost of private retirement savings accounts to $282 billion per year was quietly signed into law.
In this era of deeply divided politics, the 2022 bill known as Secure 2.0 was hailed as a bipartisan success — a victory for average Americans. It had sailed through the House by a whopping 414-5 vote. It followed four other major bills passed between 1996 and 2019 that dramatically expanded taxpayer savings – all equally lauded as bipartisan victories.
But that rare issue that brought a divided Washington together also increased wealth disparities and the federal deficit. And the victory was most strongly applauded by the burgeoning financial services industry, for whom tax-advantaged retirement savings has transformed a $7 trillion retirement market in 1995 to a $38.4 trillion behemoth in 2023.
I responded to you obnoxiously claiming that you have to pay something (in your case, a bot) to do it for you.
I explicitly started my post with “you don’t have to most someone to do it” to make it clear what my argument is about.
I’m sorry it wasn’t clear. I’ll try to do better in the future. Could you give me a pointer?
Provide the quote where I said that.
My bad. I translated that as you saying you “just need a bot to spend” but now see it was just a typo, and the meaning still should have been clear to me.
Seems weird that you focused on that and not the proceeding part about not being able to afford both rent and food. Why would a bot even be able to solve a situation where they can’t afford things in the first place?
I apparently fixed it since I see “just need to not spend” and don’t remember fixing it. Probably a delay in federation.